People / Critic

Nucleus: The Origins and Explosive Potential of Art (1)

posted 28 Sep 2020

사진제공 아트인컬처

Image Courtesy of Art in Culture

Lee Seung Jio (1941–90) is a representative figure in Korean geometric abstract painting. To Lee, the “cool” abstraction that emerged in the wake of Informel’s “warm” abstraction was the “form of the contemporary era.” He established a reputation for the way he devoted himself to making geometric abstraction his own in his day-to-day life. Parting ways completely with "painterly" art and its swirling brushstrokes, Lee Seung Jio consistently pursued a clear, linear approach to form.. The platforms for his activities were the artist groups Origin and AG; he earned the nickname of “the pipe painter.” The key element in Lee’s art is the 〈nucleus〉. He focused on the original nature and explosive energy possessed within the nucleus as the force behind a revival of new art within the chaotic Korean society that he was faced with. From his early forms emphasizing a pure formative order with clear shapes and primary colors, he proceeded to delve into the nucleus through his repetitions of and variations on pipe shapes, where two-dimensional linearity coexists oddly with the illusion of three-dimensionality. The large-scale retrospective 《Advancing Columns》 (July 1–October 4) is taking place at theNational Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea’s branch in Gwacheon for the 30th anniversary of Lee’s death. It includes over 90 works, ranging from his 1968 piece 〈Nucleus 10〉-with its motif of cylindrical shapes-to the large works of his later years. Choi Jeong-ju attempts to broaden the critical spectrum regarding the art of Lee Seung Jio-which has chiefly been discussed in terms of its relationships with Korean Monochrome painting and the illusory effects of Op Art-to analyze the influences of direct and indirect experiences with contemporary Western avant-garde art and discourse on Lee’s painting style. In particular, she examines how Lee established independence in his painting by incorporating phenomenological concepts to escape the dichotomy of representation and abstraction in the problem of “seeing,” and how he attained a “space of painting” that was both fundamental and pure. The argument is followed by an archive that looks back on Lee Seung Jio’s life-summoning history back to the present to show how, in his activities spanning the Korean and overseas art worlds, he was able to transcend the established order to become a pioneering artist for his era.

“The reason that one can sense a dynamic structural aesthetic to his arrays of pipe shapes, despite their necessarily being fixed in place, stems from his inducement of a kind of hallucinatory effect due to the continuity of replete volume. One can sense a more active form of dynamism in his works that transcend the simplicity of a mere arrangement of pipe and allude to geometric compositions such as inverted triangles and diamonds.”.

Shin Hang-seop, 「Lee Seung Jio」, 『The Stature of Contemporary Art: The Works of 12 Korean Contemporary Artists』, Hwaseong Munhwa, 1982.

“On the whole, the expressions of his canvases [. . .] effectively meet the impoverished internal conditions of painting through their elements of pure aesthetic form as they eschew representation and imitation. The figures appear dry, but thanks to the enriched formative power of the canvas, the high-density sense of surface, and the consummateness of form, they present a purification of the plane and usher us into an essential world of painting.”.

Seo Seong-rok, 「Geometrical Planes and Constructive Space」, 『Monthly Art』, March 1991.

“His paintings have taken on meaning as a kind of ‘field’ in yin and yang terms, and he hoped in this sense that they would represent expressions of the ‘inherent rhythm’ of nature as well as structural objects in their own right. [. . .] With his canvases, he attempted to infer relationships of ‘opposition,’ of every kind of conflict element confronting and withstanding the other: black and white, light and dark, full and empty, long and short, dynamic and static, strong and weak, and so forth.”

Kim Bok-yeong, 「The 25-Year History of Nucleus: An Era of Oppositional Yin and Yang Reduction」, 『Special Exhibition of Late Lee Seung Jio』 catalogue (Busan Museum of Art, 2000).

**Nucleus: The Origins and Explosive Potential of Art **

In the painting, sleek and lucid pipe shapes with a cold metallic quality are arrayed in an orderly fashion. The powerful visual stimulus and its afterimage strike us in the solar plexus, the repetition and arrangement of the pipe evoking a low and deep resonance of vibration. All these years later, the allure of Lee Seung Jio’s Nucleus series still packs a punch, instantly dominating the visual perception of the viewer.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the passage of Lee Seung Jio, who has become known as the “pipe artist.” His name and the imprint that he left behind have both faded somewhat from our memory. He arrived like the proverbial shooting star in the late 1960s, winning awards several times at the National Art Exhibition (Kukjon) with an optical geometric abstraction for which there had been no past tradition. He was a pioneer who upended currents in Korean abstract painting and laid down new signposts. He was an unusual presence who devised his very own aesthetic of avant-garde and monochrome painting in the 1970s and created a sui generis world of abstract painting through the 1980s.

Lee Seung Jio’s artistic career lasted for just over 25 years, but it was a time spent in pursuit of an exploratory avant-garde spirit based on intense self-torment and analysis. Indeed, Lee’s life itself seemed to represent a compulsion, a will to survive and exist. He was born into the Japanese occupation of Korea and lived through the Korean War at the age of just over 10 years old. In his twenties, he lived through the turbulence of a Korean society rocked by the April 19 revolution of 1960 and the May 16 coup d’etat of 1961—an era that instilled a profound sense of the meaning and value of survival. At a time when even surviving was difficult, he chose the life of an artist, experiencing a barren period where he was compelled to put his very life on the line to rebuild an art world devasted by the Korean War. For Lee Seung Jio, art was a language of survival from start to finish, something that necessitated a power of hard-fought achievement and pioneering speed.

Photo by 황정욱, 사진제공 아트인컬처

Photo by Jung wook Hwang , Image Courtesy of Art in Culture

A student painter becomes an adventurous artist

The “nucleus” was the unique language through which Lee Seung Jio made his artistic will known to the world. He identified it as the artistic metaphor “best suited to expressing the era in which I live, ever since awakening anew to the spatial consciousness of the universe with the launch of the Apollo spaceship.” With the word “nucleus” placed side-by-side with the Chinese character 核 (gai, Korean haek), he linked the idea of an “origin, foundation, essence, or kernel” with “explosive energy,” connoting both a form of artistic originality and explosive potential.

With his depiction of pipes over the course of his career and his application of the name “nucleus” to all of them, his intentions clearly spell out an artistic attempt to explore the fundamental meaning of “seeing.” As a result, Lee Seung Jio’s 〈Nucleus〉 series was able to serve as an “eye” penetrating through its times, representing both the artist himself and the essence of art.

The elaborate and robust expressive techniques seen in the Nucleus series originate in a hand sense ingrained in Lee early on during his time in middle and high school. Born in Yongchon, North Pyongan Province, in 1941, he moved to South Korea with his immediate family during the post-liberation period, taking refuge in Busan amid the Korean War before eventually settling in Seoul. He began his art class activities in 1955, during his second year at Osan Middle High, after catching the attention of art teacher Kim Chang-bok (1918–2010). An Osan School student during his time in Chongju, North Pyongan Province, Kim was an elite modernist who was two years the junior of Lee Jung-seob and had been taught by Lim Yong-ryeon and Baek Nam-soon before going on to learn about different forms of vanguard art at Tokyo Bunka Gakuen and the Imperial Art Academy in Japan. He taught comprehensive principles of academic painting, ranging from the painterly perspective toward the representational object to methods of creating canvas backgrounds, precise rendering of object shapes, selection of stable compositions, and techniques for achieving volume and density. He would also periodically speak about the need for enterprising creative desire and a romantic temperament on the artist’s part, imparting basic education on areas such as the importance of the avant-garde and the values of an artist. Amid these teachings, Lee Seung Jio demonstrated particular skill in watercolor and oil painting, as well as a conspicuous talent for still-life images of corvinas, roof tiles, and old books. His exceptional talent with sfumato is said to have been frequently praised by his teachers. The outstanding ability Lee showed during this time can be seen in 〈Corvina〉, which earned him his first selection in the Western painting category of the 8th Kukjon event in 1959, when he was a third-year high school student. At a glance, one can see the stable arrangement of objects, the natural sense of shape in the dried fish, and the concise and uncluttered representation of vivid material qualities such as the coarse reflection in the upper surface. These expressive techniques were in part the result of the artist honing a keen touch by emulating images such as the 〈Corvina〉a painted by Son Eung-seong.

Once Lee had this proficient representational sense instilled in his artistic DNA, he reached another turning point with his 1960 admission to the Western painting department at Hongik University. His arrival coincided with stirrings of awareness of the cultural currents of the times and their cries for societal reform amid the April 19 revolution of 1960 and the military coup of May 1961. Through his second year in university, Lee continued to pursue the realistic representation demanded by his department, but 〈Tile of Old Earth〉, which was selected for the 10th Kukjon event in 1961, seems to metaphorically represent a social structure undergoing upheaval with its representational shapes, which scatter broken tiles and pottery shards against a background with dark, weighty tones. Another notable transformation would ensue during his third year in 1962, when he became aware of the Informel movement that had come sweeping into both Eastern and Western painting circles outside his school; that same year, his Informel-esque 〈Energy A〉 would be selected for the 11th Kukjon. At the time, however, Informel had not only reached saturation but begun demonstrating a minimalist force of habit; to young artists brimming with enterprising spirit, it was part of the artistic establishment, something to be overcome.

Lee was a leading force in the establishment of the group Origin, joining with eight of his classmates at the time—Seo Seung-won, Choi Myoung-young, Kwon Yeong-woo, Lee Sang-rak, Kim Su-ik, Kim Taek-hwa, Shin Gi-ok, and Choi Chang-hong—to “overcome the provincialism and enervation of the artistic establishment and flesh out a direction for avant-garde art.” Seo Seung-won and Choi Myoung-young would later recall feeling that “Informel had played itself out” and sensing the “confusion of values amid the spiritual panic of the psychological oppression, poverty, and alienation of the military administration’s controls and order.” After witnessing the inaugural exhibition that June for the Zero Group by their upperclassmen from the 1959 class of the Western painting department, they went about realizing their own avant-garde aims, benefiting from the advice of critics Kim Yeong-ju, Bang Geun-taek, and Oh Kwang-su as they set out with a “sense of needing to do something.”

As the name of the group suggested, Origin advocated in its inaugural declaration for the manifestation of a new creative spirit that would expand from a “search for all original things” to a “purity of DNA,” an “intensified ordinariness to rescue life,” and a “space for viewing from a cosmic perspective.” Their attitude stood in sharp contrast with the dark expressions of passion and anger and the repudiation of the past that had been sought by Informel-affiliated artists. The avant-garde artistic aims of the members—who sought to restore past, present, and future to art’s proper order—led a year later to the inaugural 1st Origin Painting Exhibition in 1963. But apart from the anti-color painting work of Choi Myoung-young, who filled his canvas with blackness, most of the 27 works by the eight artists (not including Choi Chang-hong) failed—as Oh Kwang-su would observe—to escape the “shadow of Informel.” From the observation that Lee Seung Jio’s works 〈Old 1〉, 〈Old 2〉, and 〈Old 3〉 likewise “construct the indeterminate refinement of primitive animism in their bone strokes and lack nuance, as though having succumbed to inertia,” one can see that these were works within the Informel lineage, differing little from the aforementioned 〈Energy A〉.

Origin’s first attempt was something of a disappointment, having failed to establish a new aesthetic driving force within the stagnation of the Informel trend. At the same time, it was an incident that symbolized artists from the new generation boldly coming together to reflect on the art establishment and usher in a form of avant-garde art. The formation of Origin and the Zero Group was followed the emergence of the ‘Sinjon Group’ in 1964, ‘Nunkkol’ in 1965, the Union Exhibition of Korean Young Artists (hereafter Union Exhibition) in 1967, ‘Painting 68’ in 1968, the 'Korean Avant-Garde Association (AG)’ in 1970, and ‘Space Time (ST)’ in 1971. It thus had the effect of offering a template of sorts for the launch of small-scale associations with an orientation toward new creative experiments. Lee Seung Jio and the members of Origin went through a four-year period of inactivity owing to issues such as graduation, military enlistment, and the need to find work. Each of them could carry on with their experiments and challenges in their own ways.

Photo by 황정욱, 사진제공 아트인컬처

Photo by Jung wook Hwang , Image Courtesy of Art in Culture

Seeking all things fundamental

New work by Lee Seung Jio would eventually appear at the 《Union Exhibition》, which took from place December 11 to 16, 1967, at the Central Public Information Center gallery. This was the product of the artist’s desperate battles with the canvas after classes while working as an art teacher at Dongdaemun Industrial High School. The 《Union Exhibition》 was jointly organized by alumni from the Western art department at Hongik University, including members of the Zero Group (class of 1963), Origin (class of 1964), and Sinjon (class of 1965). It was akin to an experimental avant-garde art platform aimed at ushering contemporary Korean art to a new plateau. The artwork came as a profound shock to the art world at the time with its mixture of different characteristics including Nouveau Réalisme, Op Art, Kinetic Art, color-field abstraction, environmental art, and performance. A major factor in this alliance coming about was a rapid surge of avant-garde consciousness that emerged as Choi Myoung-young, an Origin member who had taken part in the 5th Paris Youth Biennale in 1967, shared with other artistst the same age about his perceptions of the changes in international art and the stimulus they afforded. During a 1968 lecture tour of Korea’s provinces by the North Gyeongsang Public Information Center gallery after the exhibition had closed, Oh Kwang-su and Choi Bong-hyun stressed that the international art world had “moved beyond Informel and is exhibiting trends with art objects, electric art, optical art, minimal art, and happenings.” Their remarks show the sense of mission and unity among those seeking to fill the Informel gap through engagement with the new contemporary trends.

For the 《Union Exhibition》, the Origin members exclusively presented works of painting; Lee Seung Jio sought to share a new formative stance with his 〈Nucleus-1〉, 〈Nucleus-2〉, 〈Nucleus-3〉, and Nucleus-4. They were geometric works of color-field abstraction, demonstrating left-right and top-bottom symmetry in their points, lines, planes, and circular, triangular, and rectangular shapes and the apparent use of primary color shades of yellow, red, and green. The emergence of geometric abstraction, consisting of the pure artistic order of clear shapes and colors rendered with the use of a ruler, came about amid much consideration and intense discussions with fellow group members about how to achieve a shift away from the Informel current. It was the first visible manifestation of Origin’s “search for all things fundamental.” Commenting on Origin’s aesthetic about-face, critic Lee Il observed that it was a highly unusual move in a Korean painting world that “does not boast a single Mondrian or Malevich and has no experience with the constructivist aesthetic by means of Bauhaus.” At the same time, he described the work as an example of “adopting [new Western trends] simultaneously at an almost sensory level without sufficiently grasping our own historical context and conceptual characteristics.” In that sense, he self-deprecatingly referred to it as “a mere expression of self-projection, a request borne out of the hunger for visual clarity.”

As Lee had observed, it was seen as obvious that perspectives needed to be achieved through a process of personalization amid the demands for a new landscape in the Korean art world—but it was also immensely difficult, in a social climate focused to an excessive degree on achieving accelerated modernization, to find opportunities for calm introspection into aesthetic discernment, new sources of stimulation, or antitheses. Artists at the time had virtually no system in place for direct engagement with international art; the only avenues for encountering overseas art world trends were overseas art journals and magazines: 『Bijutsu Techo, Mizue』, and 『Atelier』 in Japan and 『Time, Life』, and 『Art News』 in the West. Lee Seung Jio likewise appears to have acquired information about the overseas art and design worlds by reading the Japanese publications 『Bijutsu Techo』 and 『Idea』. His formative elements were similar to the overlapping circular and rectangular shapes and toothed protuberances shown in reference plates in two 『Bijutsu Techo』 pieces: one in the June 1960 edition titled “WORK SHOP: Basics of Shape Creation 5, Geometric Motive” and another in the November 1960 edition titled 「WORK SHOP: Basics of Shape Creation 10, Filling and Partitioning.」 The circumstances can also be surmised from the similarities to the horizontal arrangement seen in 〈Fugue〉 (1925) by Josef Albers. Examples of referring to images and forms from art journals can be found in many works from this period—a reflection of the painful reality at the time in terms of the patterns of adopting avant-garde art due to the limitations of the contemporary Korean art world.

Assessments of Origin’s work drew no clear distinction with the preceding currents of geometric abstraction and Op Art. The reason seems to have had to do with geometric abstraction possessing only a weak grounding within the art world, while Op Art was perceived as a transplanted art phenomenon and not subjected to proactive analysis. Op Art first announced itself internationally in 1965 alongside Pop Art and Nouveau Réalism at events such as the Paris Youth Biennale and the Bienal de São Paulo; it would subsequently be reported on in various publications in Korea and overseas. The 『Kyunghyang Sinmun』 newspaper published an article on March 13 of that year under the title 「Op Art: A New Movement in the US」 and an interview on July 28 with artist Kim Whan-ki, which stated that “Op Art—an art form that is close to science—is in full flight in the US.” 〈The Responsive Eye〉, an Op Art exhibition held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was the focus of a piece in the May edition of 『Bijutsu Techo』. Korean artists shared their own geometric elements and Op Art tendencies at the 《10th Contemporary Artist Invitational Exhibition 》held by the 『Chosun Ilbo』 newspaper in 1966, with Ha Jong-hyun presenting his 〈Birth A〉 and 〈Birth B〉 and Jeon Sung-woo his 〈Saekdong Mandala〉; Park Seo-bo carried on the trend with his Hereditarius〉 series in 1968. But critics were particularly uncomfortable with Op Art, referring to it as a “mutation” with “ideas seemingly representing the strands of a different country.” Artists similarly distanced themselves from Op Art, indirectly expressing that they had embodied the indigenous sentiments of Korea’s ‘traditional obangsaek colors’. The members of Origin, for their part, said they were ‘against’ critics classifying their work within the Op Art lineage, stressing that they were ‘pursuing clear and sharp forms alone’.

Lee Seung Jio’s performance at the 《Union Exhibition》 was a successful turning point both for him and for the painting world. He had announced the end of warm abstract painting and ushered in a new aesthetic of cool geometric abstraction, planting a clear and firm first step as he shared the “nucleus” for the first time as a theme and orientation that would be present throughout his subsequent body of work.